


The Silence

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Spies & Secret Agents, Temporary Character Death, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 19:59:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3087014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok, this is a complex meditation on the premise that John should be left out because he can't lie worth beans. I'm divided: He can't. He's not a good liar. But I also think there are ways to modify it, and regardless, lying to him is a high-risk choice. </p><p>This is written to fit MY head canon Mary, and my own ideas of how she might eventually leave the show--her disappearance (with the baby added for good measure) roughly parallels Birdy Edwards' final exit in "The Valley of Fear." Or, perhaps more precisely, her exit parallels what I think Mycroft and Sherlock in "our" BBC Sherlock would make of Birdy Edwards' exit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Silence

Sherlock found John walking along the shoreline, staring out over the dark, restless water, with Gladstone at his heels. He looked so small, Sherlock thought, frowning: a small man hunched into a large, bulky jumper with a shawl collar rolled high—and not to look “cool.” The wind whipped in off the waves and stirred John’s dun hair—hair increasingly silver-tawny, like bleached ocean grass at the end of winter. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets. His eyes studied the horizon, as though if he just looked far enough and long enough he’d see hope.

Sherlock could imagine what hope would look like to John. First it would be a little black chip on the skyline, a nick in the perfect pewter enamel of sky and water, showing the darker ground beneath. Then it would come nearer, and John would call back to his friend, “Sherlock? Is that a ship?” And Sherlock would call back, “No, John, it’s a boat. A ship is larger.” Then it would come closer still, and the light would pick out moving forms on the deck. Two forms—a delicate, slight woman clutching the hand of a young toddler. The pale winter sun would glint off both fair heads. The woman would lean down toward the child, saying something, and then both would wave and wave and wave. John, afraid to believe, would say, “Sherlock? Sherlock, is that them?”

And Sherlock would have to say “No.” Not that the boat would come. It would not. But if a boat came, and if it should heave close to shore, and if there should be a woman and a child, their pale blonde heads glowing like beacons on a dark winter’s day, Sherlock would still have to say no. “No, John. I’m sorry. They’re gone. They were lost overboard three weeks ago.”

He’d gone out with John on the ferry from which Mary and the child had been lost. The general belief was the child had somehow fallen, and Mary gone in after her trying to save her from the waves, too terrified to wait and call for help. There was, however, very little evidence one way or another…or had been until Mary’s wallet had been found in a fishing net, and one of little Em’s hand-knit mittens had washed ashore north of Dublin.

John had held the wreath clutched tight in his hands. He shook in the cold wind. His face was gaunt as Lord Winter’s own. It was as though, in a single moment, he’d grown old. From the moment Mycroft had arrived with the news, determined that John at least not hear of the loss from strangers, John had grown distant. He’d looked at Sherlock, fingers crimped into dark yew and yellow roses, and said, “You’d tell me if there was any hope, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me if there was evidence? That she’d had to run to protect us all? That she’d learned her enemies were after her? You’d tell me if she was trying to lead them away, then disappear?”

Sherlock had stared out over the sea. “There’s nothing I can tell you, John. There’s no evidence left behind. The analysts Mycroft assigned think Moriarty’s remaining cadre killed them—but they can’t prove it.”

“She may still be alive.”

Sherlock let his silence speak for him, then. He couldn’t have said more if he’d wished to—his throat closed tight, and to his own terror he found himself blinking back tears and bitter regrets. It was long moments before he was able to say, “I can throw the wreath further out than you, if you’d like.”

“No,” John growled. “No. That’s _my_ job. My _privilege._ No matter what—no matter why it happened, being her husband was a privilege. Being Em’s father….” He couldn’t say more. Instead he stalked to the rail—a rail so high it beggared the imagination how little Em might have slipped and fallen. Sherlock, considering, had thought, uneasily, “John will think she must have been thrown. He will imagine that little body heaved overboard like garbage, her screams no different than the screams of the gulls, with Mary shrieking and helpless, or perhaps already dead and in the water. That’s what he’ll imagine…”

The thought made him ill.

John had thrown the wreath. He was too short, as Sherlock had known he would be. The wreath didn’t fall far, and it seemed to cling to the ferrry’s side, caught tight by the flow of the wake. Macabre imagination made it seem to claw and scratch, trying to come back aboard.

John had shut his eyes tight, and said, “I miss you. Oh, God, Mary, I miss you so much. And Em, baby…” His voice had broken, then, and he’d cried, saying only, “Come home, love. Please, please, God, send them home.”

Sherock had stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, guilty and angry and lost, because he was Sherlock Holmes and could say nothing—and no one, not even John, would find that remotely odd. He was Sherlock Holmes, and comfort was something he had never known how to give, nor much wanted to give if it came down to it. Until now.

When the ferry came ashore at Dublin, he and John had gone walking. They’d stopped at a pub and drunk Guinness. They’d rented a bedroom at a little hotel—two beds, no matter what the man at the counter thought. For once Sherlock didn’t find the old mistake amusing—but, then, for once John barely noted the assumptions being made. He was hollow-eyed and weary. Sherlock went out and bought a bottle of whiskey and several carrier bags of Chinese take-away and came back, only to find John sprawled in graceless exhaustion on his own bed, his snores only interrupted by intermittent nightmares and a dreamer’s mourning.

He ate the Chinese himself, and shot back more whiskey than was good for him, and carefully chose not to text Mycroft, because he no longer trusted John not to steal his phone and search it for any sign that could be translated into hope—hope Sherlock could not offer.

Did not dare offer.

“How’s he taking it,” Mycroft asked when they next met at the Diogenes.

“Badly. But you knew that.” Sherlock’s eyes darted reproach at his older brother. “He’s mourning. Grieving.”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, patient and passionless. “As he must.”

“We could have told him.”

Mycroft cocked his head, and said, softly, “Could we have, Sherlock? You know him best. He’s your friend. Could we tell him the truth and trust him to play it to the world?”

Sherlock’s head dropped. “No,” he said, throat tight. “No. He’s not an actor.” His face had screwed up, then, and for a moment he’d struggled. Then, calmer, he said, simply, “A drama queen. But—no. Not an actor.”

“He’d give it away.”

“Yes.”

“And Mary and Em would have no chance.”

Sherlock sighed, and nodded. “Does it matter? Even if they live, what are the chances they’ll ever be safe to come back to him?”

Mycroft kept Sherlock in his steady stare, then said, “I’ve told you enough times, Sherlock. You tell me—what are the odds?”

“One point seven in a thousand they will live and be safe to return.”

“And the odds that they’ll live at all if anyone determines they didn’t actually die on the ferry?”

“Probability approaches zero.”

“Can we risk telling John?”

“He’s grieving,” Sherlock said, boiling up from the leather seat of the armchair by the fire. He leaned over Mycroft, poised so calmly in the twin chair. “Have you no heart at all?”

Mycroft froze, and picked at non-existent lint on his immaculate jacket sleeve. Sherlock felt a furious shudder of guilt—there was hurt in the gesture, barely concealed at all, and never concealed from Sherlock. “Of course I don’t,” he said, finally, voice tight and edging into angry spite. “We both know I gave up having a heart years since.”

“This is your fault.”

“For setting Mary to guard John all those years back?”

“And never telling him what she was.”

“What part of undercover protection do you not understand? What part of her desire to start over?”

“But if you’d told…”

“But I didn’t, for reasons you’d have thought sufficient yourself at the time.”

Sherlock would never admit Mycroft was right. It was one of the privileges of being the wild card, the outsider. He never had to admit his choices would have marched in accord with his brother’s when the outcome displeased him. He could pretend—to himself if not to Mycroft—that he’d have chosen better.

But this choice? The choice he struggled with daily? This one he couldn’t lie about. Mary and Em’s lives depended on the illusion she was dead. And John, no matter how loyal, no matter how determined, could not act his way out of a brown paper bag. Not even if he’d been armed with a machete first. If he’d known they lived, he’d have bollocksed the whole thing up.

Sherlock had spun, and paced, and snarled, and sought other answers all that evening—and in the end had stormed from the Diogenes and walked London alone for hours. He’d ended up on the street in front of John and Mary’s little terraced house, knowing that inside John was alone, and suffering.

It was a choice of betrayals, Sherlock thought—and the greater betrayal would be to do anything that caused John to be the one who accidentally set the hounds on the trail of his wife and child. So Sherlock once again chose the lesser, and left his friend to his grief.

Now he watched the man walking on the beach, the dog he and Mary had adopted a year before his only companion. It was a hard sea—dark and wild. It was a hard beach, more cobble than sand. It was a hard, bitter wind that cut to the bone. Sherlock sighed, hunched into the Belstaff, twitched the collar up high and tugged the scarf close, and stalked across the strand to meet him.

Neither man said anything. They walked together, each with his eyes to the horizon, each seeing an imagined boat and an imagined woman and child.

“It’s time to come in,” Sherlock said. “My parents will worry if we’re out too late.”

John nodded, but said, “You go ahead. I won’t be long. I just—want a little more time alone.”

Sherlock nodded, and paced away.

 

John, standing with his back to the darkling sea as the sun dimmed, watched him leave, and fought with a bitter blend of affection and anger. Every time he waited and wondered—would this be the day Sherlock told him? Every time it wasn’t, and John wavered between thinking him as ice cold and merciless as his brother, and admiring him for holding to the faith John understood he kept.

He rolled the ring in his pocket around and around. Mary’s gold ring. She’d slipped it into his hand the night before, giggling and hissing, “You keeps it, my precious. Bless us and splash us, you keeps it for me.”

John had laughed, uneasy at the joke. “Mary, does this really have to happen?”

She nodded, grim and warrior-eyed. “Yes, love. It has to happen.”

“And I can’t do anything to help?”

“Mycroft and Sherlock have the resources—and the ice instead of blood in their veins. John, I only need you to do one thing…and you know what it is.”

“Act.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She shrugged, then said, softly, “John—I may never be able to come back. Em may never be able to come back. You may never see us again in all our lives. I think a bit of mourning might be called for, even if you do know we’re not dead.”

He had shuddered as the finality of the coming separation hit him. “It’s real.”

She nodded.

“They’ll kill you if you don’t disappear.”

“Me. Em. Quite possibly you and Sherlock. Anyone else who’s in the line of fire come the time of the attack. I can’t guess how much collateral damage. I’d suspect quite a bit. With Moriarty dead and proven to be gone, they want vengeance and they need to recover their credibility. They’ll be looking for something dramatic. A massacre.”

John had seen massacres—and he knew the emotional and psychological war game of violence for the sake of showmanship. He swallowed hard. “Run, then,” he said, breaking at the thought. “Run far, and never look back.”

“I’ll always look back,” she whispered. “And if Mycroft ever sends word I can come home—I will, love.” She unfolded his fingers and looked again at her ring. She touched it with wonder, as though it were a little, living miracle. “I love you, John Watson.”

He smiled—a watery, broken smile. “I love you, Mary Watson.”

“Even though the part of me that’s not Mary brought this on us?”

“Not just you,” he said. “This is aimed as much at Mycroft and Sherlock and, yes, even me, as at you.”

She nodded, wearily. “Yes.”

“Do you regret becoming just Mary Watson?”

“Not for a second.”

He pulled her close, and kissed her fiercely. “Make love to me.”

“Not till you put that ring somewhere safe.”

He kept it in his pocket, now, never showing it to Sherlock. He mourned—because even if she and Em lived, they were gone, and he was alone, and his dearest friend was trapped in a lie neither man knew how to untie.

The moon was rising, showing through haze and patchy cloud—just enough to glow on the water of the Irish Sea. Seeing it, he smiled, and blew a single kiss. Then he returned down the road toward the house by the salt marsh, where Sherlock’s parents had brought them to mourn and heal. As he walked, he sang “Au Claire de la Lune” under his breath, and the ring was never out of his gentle grasp.


End file.
